


Prayer

by vega_voices



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-03
Updated: 2011-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-22 04:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vega_voices/pseuds/vega_voices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She dreams of being a mother and of her father as a benevolent grandfather, not a harsh, angry dictator who is willing to sacrifice his own children as a means to an end for his country.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Prayer

**Title:** Prayer  
 **Author:** [](http://vegawriters.livejournal.com/profile)[**vegawriters**](http://vegawriters.livejournal.com/)  
 **Fandom:** NCIS  
 **Pairing:** mentions of Ziva/Ray and Ziva/Michael. Ziva, Tony friendship.  
 **Rating:** Teen  
 **A/N:** She won’t stop talking to me!  
 **Disclaimer:** I keep falling in love with beautiful characters already written by other people. If CBS is looking for a young, up and coming writer who will devote herself wholeheartedly to the process, I’m the right girl. Otherwise, I make no money from this. NCIS, Ziva, and Tony belong to other people. I’m just walking with them for a while.

 **Summary:** _She dreams of being a mother and of her father as a benevolent grandfather, not a harsh, angry dictator who is willing to sacrifice his own children as a means to an end for his country._

  
**Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has made us holy through His commandments and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath light.  
~Jewish Sabbath Blessing**

Ziva hums an old folk tune as she steps through the door of her apartment and shakes the rain from her hair. There are some things about America she will never adjust to, and the East Coast rain is one of them. She’s contemplated moving to the deserts of the Southwest, but her job is too much her life.

It is a rare Friday when she is able to leave with enough time before sundown to make it to the bakery to pick up bread for dinner, change her clothes from work, and actually set the table. Most Friday nights she allows herself only part of the process – two lit candles, a prayer, bread – knowing that God hears her no matter the rituals she performs. But tonight, she can relax and even contemplate the rare appearance at Temple in the morning. It is the first weekend in months she does not need to worry about being called in. She is well over her overtime allotment and she covered the weekend before for Tony.

Leaving the apartment dim as she moves through the living space to her bedroom, Ziva sheds every bit of clothing and stands, stark naked in front of her closet, contemplating a traditional skirt and blouse but decides on a comfortable black tank top and a pair of gray lounge pants. For all her devotion, her traditional ways extend only to the white scarf she removes from a dresser drawer that holds her Tanakh and other religious items. Her eyes linger briefly on Michael’s Tallit, somehow in the explosion that destroyed everything she held sacred, this survived.

She misses him. He betrayed her, but she misses him. The story of her life.

Barefoot, she moves back across her hardwood floors. One of the boards in her bedroom is warped and her toes worry the groove for a moment. Out of a locked drawer in her kitchen she pulls two wooden candlesticks and two white candles and a small book of matches.

There is no real time to cook but she can reheat the food that she picked up the night before and never touched. It is always better the next day anyway and while dinner heats in the microwave, she sets the table.

When she is alone in her apartment, candles glowing, and the weight of her choices around her that she lets her mind drift to a fantasy for which she was never destined. It isn’t that Ziva David ever wanted to be an American Fairy Princess. In fact, until she met Jenny Shepherd, she never even wanted to be an American. In her mind, the two-faced support of Israel was detrimental to the area’s survival. The government’s willingness to destroy the Middle East in a blind effort to make an empirical point makes her skin crawl. She believes in her homeland and her country and lies awake at night listening to the ghosts of her family who had been killed before escaping Germany and Poland and Russia. She prays for a world where little girls do not grow up to be assassins but instead tough, single minded NCIS agents who investigate simple crimes, not murders and terror plots.

Alone, Ziva dreams of a world where she shoots guns not because she needs to but because she can. She dreams of being a mother and of her father as a benevolent grandfather, not a harsh, angry dictator who is willing to sacrifice his own children as a means to an end for his country. She dreams of a life with Michael. She dreams still that she will open her door and Ari will catch her in his arms and spin her around and they will laugh together like they used to.

Once, she told Tony that assassins did not have regrets. She lied. She is full of them.

But she does not regret her choice to stay in America. She has almost forgotten what it was like to walk into a coffee shop and check her surroundings for anything that might be a bomb. She is used to driving on the other side of the road and it has been over a year since her last accident. She’s discovered the beauty of American women and has fallen in love with an American man who, like her, is not homegrown from the soil. But she knows there is more to Ray than what he has told her and she fears that despite his best intentions, her heart will again be stepped on because of her family. She is not stupid and she knows to trust her instincts.

Maybe this, she realizes, is why American girls dream of being princesses in animated movies. It shields them from a reality that can destroy even the strongest of people. What harm is there in wanting to see life through innocent eyes?

A knock on the door startles her out of her reverie and she moves slowly, the motion of her hips intentional. Tony stands at the door, holding a bottle of wine. He is smiling softly.

This has become their ritual, something no one on the team knows about; when they have Friday nights off, he joins her for dinner. Gibbs might know, but Gibbs knows everything. And just like Gibbs knows, Ziva knows that Tony is more than an overgrown child still hung up on his hormones. She knows that his time loving Jeanne changed him and that he misses her much like she still misses Michael. A part of her wishes he was not so much like a brother to her, because that part of her wants to take him in her arms and to kiss away the hurts that haunt both of them. He offers the bottle and she takes it before turning to let him inside.

This too is part of the ritual. They do not speak until she has lit the candles and said the prayer. To speak is to ruin the spell and a part of her wonders if either of them ever settle down, will they still share this time or will they drift apart, as so many married friends do.

The microwave signals that dinner is ready and Tony beats her to the kitchen, smiling as he removes the dish and bringing it to the table. Ziva quietly places her scarf over her head and lights the candles as he takes a place across from her.

Ziva covers her eyes, feeling the weight of her faith upon her shoulders. She recites the prayer in Hebrew, remembering her mother and her father. Ari. Michael. Even Catelin. And then the ritual is over, simplified from how it was at her father’s table, and she will go to Temple in the morning. They sit. Tony serves.

Ziva pops a bit of bread into her mouth and focuses on the dripping wax from the candles. Her faith comes up so infrequently at work, although whenever Abby goes to get lunch for the team she is thoughtful enough to choose Kosher options. Gibbs tries to give her Friday nights off, though their schedules rarely allow for any faith celebration. She knows Abby attends church nearly every Sunday and she has a feeling that Gibbs does as well. Even after six years in the states, she is still caught off guard at the world seeming to stop on Sundays rather than Saturdays. She is also still caught off guard at the thinly veiled anti-Semitism that crops up in media reporting and political choices. For a country that goes out of it’s way to say it protects Israel, it has more than a few issues with Jews in its own borders.

She wonders what would happen if she spoke up to the team, telling them that she didn’t think the US presence in the Middle East was good for the long term survival of Israel even if she did understand their rationale for going in. She too often wanted to blow the heads off of anyone who ever dared to point a gun at her people. She hates the American insolence regarding the freedom to carry weapons. There is a lack of thought and a glory in violence that leads to young boys believing that violence is a means to an end and that women are to be held as trophies.

How similar they are to the enemies they kill.

But the same could be said between the Arabs and the Jews. She knows this.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

American idioms still make no sense to her. Shouldn’t thoughts be worth more than a penny? “Could you marry a Jewish girl?” The question comes unbidden and she realizes she is thinking about Ray, but there is a momentary pause in Tony’s eyes and she wonders if Ray’s suspicions about her partner are true.

He pauses, taking a long sip of his wine, and Ziva lets him think. The hesitation makes her heart sink and she realizes she has never asked Ray this question. The empty box he gave her, the “promise” he would return after his latest mission, took her buy surprise and now she wonders if he has put serious thought into what it means for her to marry. She wonders if she has accepted it. She had expected to spend her life with Michael.

“I could if she was you,” Tony says with a soft smile. He reaches across the table, through the candlesticks, to stroke her cheek. He touched her the same way in Paris, the morning they woke curled together under the covers, bodies pressed together, wanting more than they were willing to give. There is no need to diffuse the situation with humor and she leans into his touch, glad for his honesty.

“Why just me?”

“I could because of you,” he corrects himself. The smile spreads across his face and Ziva chuckles.

“So, before me?”

“I had images of Jewish grandmothers standing on porches, beating off suitors with their purses.”

“I thought that was Italian grandmothers.”

He laughs. “Not so different after all.” His hand lingers. Ziva lets herself break the moment. If it continues, she will have things to explain to Ray. So she hands him the bread and stares at the tablecloth. “Do you miss it?” Tony’s voice is soft.

“Miss what?”

“Doing this with your family?”

A sigh she did not know was in her escaped her lungs. “I have made my choices,” she says softly. “But I do miss the solidarity of a faith keeping a country together. I miss knowing that around tables all over the country, the same rituals were being performed. I miss the peace of the streets on the Sabbath.” She shakes her head, anticipating his comment. “Yes, around tables all over this country, the same ritual is being performed, but … it is different. And I love that and it only makes me miss Israel even more. But I love this country. I love it here. And so while there are things I miss, I am glad to be here.”

When he smiles, she is glad he doesn’t press the issue. Ziva sighs and lets herself chew another piece of bread slowly. The silence is comfortable. It always has been.

For a moment, she wonders if that is enough.

~fin~


End file.
